Sometimes the best way to appreciate a place is to not be from there. This feels like a weird thing to state in words, but I suspect you get what I mean. There’s can be a perspective advantage to being an outsider, letting you see things about a place that the people who are immersed in it can’t see, in the way fish don’t seem particularly interested in water. Artist David Hockney, though, he was very interested in water, especially if that water was contained within a blue-painted swimming pool in Los Angeles, and, ideally, populated with naked men. David Hockney died yesterday, at the visually compelling age of 88, leaving a legacy of some of the most powerful and exuberant art of the last century, and, since we’re still a car site, one BMW art car.
Most of us know Hockney from his long-running series of pool-related paintings, paintings that I think capture the essence of what Southern California wishes to be, and, sometimes, actually is. And person who was able to spot this essence and so effectively capture it, visually, was someone who comes from a place about as far, visually and conceptually, from sunny SoCal as you can imagine: West Yorkshire, England.
Born in 1937, Hockney went to the Royal College of Art, and began his art career with works that could be considered Pop Art adjacent, sort of. He grew tired of London and its grayness, its expense, and just the general Londoness of it all, and moved to Los Angeles in 1964, where he began to paint the works that I think most people know him for today.
Like 1967’s A Bigger Splash:
Hockney is far more than just one work, but if you had to pick one, at spearpoint, this one may be the one to pick. You can somehow feel the bright, relentless sunlight, so much so that looking at this painting in a dark room still makes me want to squint.
It’s simple planes and flat expanses of color save for the palm trees, a line of plants and that splash, that exuberant, untamed splash of paint that represents a splash of water. Santa Monica should make this painting their flag.
The difficulties and challenges of rendering water, especially pool water, in paint were a huge draw for Hockney, and he tried all manner of approaches to the problem, from the highly abstracted:
…to the more naturalistic:
Hockney absolutely delighted in the process of trying to render water. And that’s a key part of all of Hockney’s art: delight. The man seemed to love the world and all the brightly sunlit things in it, and his art was a means to attempt to broadcast that joy wherever he could.
He also was a fan of technology and playing with tech in novel ways to create art. One of my favorite things that Hockney did was to embrace fax machines for art purposes, sometimes sending his works to gallery shows entirely via fax, with instructions on the first page about how to assemble the hundreds of pages to follow into a coherent work.
It’s clever and I love how the limitations of what faxes can do define the work. Plus, there’s something just fun about turning a utilitarian office machine like a fax into a medium for art.
This is still an automotive site, so let me drag this back around to cars and driving. For example, Hockney produced some of what I think are the best representations of what a desert highway feels like to be on, with his interesting photo collages, like the incredible Pearblossom Hwy, which you can see him talking about here:
It’s a remarkable work, a sort of painting made from 800 photographs, and was originally made for a Vanity Fair story about Humbert Humbert, the creepy narrator of Nabokov’s novel Lolita, and his long road trip across America. Even without that context, it conveys the excitement, loneliness, freedom, and adventure of a long desert drive so remarkably well.
Hockney did BMW’s 14th art car in 1995, with a BMW 850 CSi as the medium. Hockney sought to represent some of the interior parts of the car on the outside, like having a stylized intake manifold on the hood, and on one side we see the occupants of the car, a human driver and a little dachshund, likely inspired by these fellas:
Hockney’s statement about painting the BMW Art Car was short but summed up the artist’s longtime intent very well: “It was lots of fun.”
David Hockney was lots of fun indeed, an artist who reveled in the joys of life, and who sought to spread that joy visually, in all manner of novel ways. He had a long and productive run, and I have a lot of respect for what he brought to the world.
Rest in peace, ideally by a pool.
The first I knew about Mr. Hockney was Pearblossom Highway. I tried that technique (but with probably not enough prints) and it’s harder than it looks.
It’s a print from his Mexico City exhibit decades ago, but I have pride of place to one of his fax works.
I know someone else who graduated from the RCA.
Nipper?
OH, right,right, different RCA. Ian Callum?
You can go off people you know.
It’ll probably be better to wait till you send me the official 00 license.
How is the task of the taskmaster going?
I love Hockney’s work and his way of finding joy in the quotidian. Like most people I had been introduced to his work through his California paintings, but I did not appreciate the breadth of his work and his exploration until I saw the Met retrospective in 2017. That was where I first learned of, among other things, his iPad work.
The first time I became vaguely aware of David’s work was the opening credits of “California Suite” (1978)
Oddly enough – Some good cars in that film too:
Alan Alda’s Pastel Blue 1977 Mercedes-Benz 450SL
Walter Matthau’s BIL’s 1st Gen Cadillac Seville
The hired Rolls Royce Phantom V to take Maggie Smith and Michael Caine to the Oscars
The 1977 Chevrolet Caprice wagon which winds up dead on the freeway, and the 1974 AMC Matador which Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor and their on-screen wives need to be cut out of after rear-ending a car transporter loaded with new Mercury wagons.
Lovely tribute, Jason. We all know how eyeball-centric you are; it would have been great on The Autopian even if he’d never painted a car.
Artopian should be a semi-regular feature.
I heard a story about him on the radio this morning. Apparently he spent a whole week painting just the splash in that piece.
Hockney is one of those that you don’t realize how prolific and how inspiring his work was unless you’re actively in art in some fashion. He ended up everywhere. As mentioned below, a Top Gear car was inspired by his art car, Bojack had a striking example (and in general I think some of the scenes were inspired by his work,) and of course dozens or hundreds of modern artists.
Big shoes to fill.
Sometimes when I’m interacting with a very familiar place or activity, I try to cast myself as a foreigner or time traveler or alien and imagine how it would look to them. Gives my brain something to do on, say, a long drive that I’ve taken dozens of times.
As a very amateur photographer, I can understand Hockney’s fascination with the light in California. I recently moved from a hilly part of NJ to very flat Delaware, and the flatness just plays differently with sunlight. Where I came from, it was often filtered through trees, and the early morning or late evening sun would hide behind the hills. Here, it’s always present, and it makes colors and features on the landscape really pop.
One of my relatives was born during the Civil War. Sometimes I wonder how he would react to being dropped suddenly into a modern house with all of the conveniences or – to keep it on-topic – into a modern car.
Would he adjust or would be be continuously and irreversibly freaked out? I suppose it would depend on his personality, but I don’t really have any info on that so it remains a thought exercise.
We all hope we will react like Fred Kwan, but likely like Guy Fleegman.
I dunno – Guy pulled it together pretty well (after the initial freakout) and became the plucky comic relief and protector on the Protector
I love Pearblossom Hwy. As a college student I found it somewhere in a magazine, cut it out, and framed it. I didn’t know who David Hockney was and wasn’t familiar with any of his other work. I was an engineering student, not an art student 🙂
Thank you Jason, for the well written piece. I had never heard of David Hockney or seen his work as I am not familiar with most art, but you have made me quite interested in it with your always interesting perspective, your obvious art knowledge, and your general passion for mediums of expression.
Oh and since this is the autopian, I wonder if that BMW Art car could get a good buyback deal if using Quinn? Imagine explaining to the chatbot why you expect far above market value for your BMW with a unique paint job.
Thank you for this, Jason!!
I believe Mr. Hockney may have been the influence for the BMW “art” car the three
dingusesamigos did for an exhibit on Top Gear ages ago. Hammond had gone to art school somewhere so it was likely his doing; IIRC he tried to replicate internal car parts on the outside, with significantly less success but with excellent enthusiasm. 🙂That would be great for Jason to do, maybe to the $700 Shitbox Showdown Lumina.
Good idea – it is an increasingly blank canvas 🙂
That is a fantastic idea! If nothing else, it would like, double the value of the car!